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Comment by PLMUV9A4UP27D | Hacker News Reader

At my company we make a niche software used by companies globally. Our plan was to arrange a conference in the US for our clients in North/Cental America. Considering the state of the US, we will probably cancel it, as we don't expect our Mexican and Canadian clients to feel comfortable at all. Neither do we at the head office in Europe. We will instead host it in Europe most likely.

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I remember when the ACM ICPC had to be moved from Egypt to the US during the Arab Spring. It's got to be a logistics nightmare to move a conference, but it's best to bite the bullet at the first sign of trouble.

You could host it in Mexico or Canada, they're pretty nice!

For many travellers it would be hard to find a flight plan without a stop in the US though.

And since many US airports do not have facilities for 'sterile transfers', people will require a US C1 Transit Visa to travel connecting through US.

This is deliberate. To my knowledge, absolutely no US airports allow you to transit without going through immigration, and stopovers in the US are very hard to avoid because the FAA imposes a hefty fee to flights over the country unless they stop at a US airport.

So it's very expensive to overfly the US without landing, and once you land you can't avoid immigration even if you are just transiting on your way to another country.

> the FAA imposes a hefty fee to flights over the country

The overland fee is $61.75 per 100 nautical miles (and it's a lower $26.51 per 100 nautical miles)[1]. Is this really that high? Let's say a flight from Canada to Mexico has to cross 1600 nautical miles overland the US. That would cost 16 x 61.75 = $988. Isn't that pretty low? On a flight with 200 passengers, that's an extra $5 per passenger.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/international_aviation/overf...

This has got me wondering how many flights currently fly over Greenland…

There are no airports in the US where you can transfer between two international flights without entering the US.

Are they hard to get? I’d expect transferring through the US to be significantly easier than travelling into the US for a conference.

They require issuance of paper visas and an in-person interview. It's _easier_ than B1/B2 visas; but in the overall scheme of things not _that_ much easier.

For a person deliberately avoiding the US (whether out of principle or otherwise), I can't imagine a trip through customs for a transfer would be acceptable either.

idk this. Thank you.

From which countries do you need to transit through the US to get either to Canada or Mexico?

'Need', probably none. But the workaround may involve a very long and expensive detour.

Never thought of it, but I guess that will eventually change.

That's a great idea. I can't speak about Mexican alternatives but there are many great locations in Canada for a conference.

If the conference was originally going to be held on the west coast of the US then Vancouver would be an excellent alternative and if it was going to be held on the east coast then Montreal is another excellent alternative.

Can anyone suggest some viable alternatives in Mexico?

Depends on when the conference is scheduled, but Mexico has some world renewed venues at the seaside - say Cancun- that nobody minds visiting when it’s winter at home. :-)

I work for a US company that almost exclusively hosts internal get-togethers in Cancun.

It's much better value for money than anywhere in the US.

I was in a conference in a resort in Riviera Maya some years back. 10/10 would recommend. I was amazed to see you could even drink the tap water.

I noted that a bunch of physicists met in Cancun on December 10th to discuss the new Galaxy survey that led to questioning the stability of the strength of deep energy.

Those guys were pretty smart

Traveling to awesome places is a perk of (physics) academia that is not widely appreciated. A large fraction of physicist seems to do rock-climbing or other hobbies that align well with exploring the outdoors when traveling.

I got my first taste of this with this was a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps [0], and after graduating I did postdoc positions on three different continents -- all the time appreciating that unlike corporate expats, I got to choose the exact place to go next. Would highly recommend this way of traveling over backpacking.

[0] https://www.houches-school-physics.com/ecole-de-physique-des...

I've been in conferences in Ciudad de México and it was a very pleasant experience. I honestly haven't been anywhere else in Mexico.

The Canadian government has this travel advisory for Mexico: https://travel.gc.ca/destinations/mexico

Aren't there still violent conflicts with drug gangs where citizens are killed still going on in Mexico?

Yes absolutely. It’s odd to see people here suggesting Mexico as an alternative based on safety of travelers. It’s a giveaway that they’re simply being opportunistic in attacking America due to their opposition to the administration, rather than anything actually safety related.

As an example, this article from 2025 about a family of foreigners being shot dead also lists numerous other recent examples of tourists being killed, and links to those stories:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/01/world/americas/americans-...

Those aren’t even the only ones, and physical harm isn’t the only type of crime foreigners can experience in Mexico either. Moving a conference there for safety makes no sense whatsoever.

There are certainly plenty of areas in Mexico that are dangerous (typically along the US border and drug routes), but it's not as though everywhere in the country is more dangerous than everywhere in the US. E.g., I've been to academic conferences in plenty of US cities that rank among the most dangerous in the world (Baltimore, Oakland, Philly, etc.), [0] as well as Mexico City, which decidedly does not rank among the most dangerous -- let alone the resort destinations. The reality is, "family on vacation murdered in cartel territory" is going to draw a lot more media attention than "family on vacation robbed in New Orleans" or "overwhelming majority of families have perfectly safe vacations". You can't judge by sensationalist articles how safe a place actually is, let alone an entire nation the size of Mexico.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...

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